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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies
by Michael W. Kauffman.
Illustrated, index, bibliography, appendix, 508 pp., 2004. Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019 $35 plus shipping.
To put it succinctly: Michael W. Kauffman’s book, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies is a gift to all Lincoln/assassination/Civil War enthusiasts and researchers. In seeking to re-examine the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln with a fresh and holistic view of the original sources, and, most importantly, to replace and understand Booth within the context of his own time — something so long neglected — Kauffman has undeniably and impressively achieved his goal with an exciting and elucidating work. From the beginning, Kauffman, an independent researcher/historian who has studied the assassination for 30 years and previously edited Memoirs of a Lincoln Conspirator by Samuel Bland Arnold, draws the reader in by unfolding the assassination and its aftermath, point-by-point and moment-by-moment, in all its contemporary terror and wonder. He gives equal (and unparalleled) attention not only to Lincoln and Booth, but also the attack on William Seward, the actions and motivations of Edwin Stanton and the actions of Booth’s conspirators. Kauffman retraces and weaves into the text a biography of John Wilkes Booth and shows Booth was not an insane monster, but rather a sensitive, intelligent man who, above all, was a patriot to the Southern cause. Interweaving contemporary politics, events and social issues with a description of Booth’s formative years, Kauffman conveys Booth’s personality and motivations in a way no previous assassination book has ever accomplished. Kauffman shows Booth as, above all, a master manipulator of people whose main weapon was “misdirection.” He snared his conspirators into a web of culpability and complicity that prevented them from ever revealing his plot. This misdirection included hints at Confederate government involvement in the plot, which gave him prestige and legitimacy as a ringleader. As Kauffman shows, this was mere deceit. Other myths/theories Kauffman analyzes, deconstructs and ultimately puts to rest include the true state of Booth’s acting career, the extent of complicity by the conspirators — especially Dr. Samuel A. Mudd — when Booth broke his leg, and whether it was indeed Booth killed at Garrett‘s barn. Kauffman’s research is exhaustive, citing sources before unseen. Yet while Kauffman’s copious notations are a treasure to any assassination scholar, his audience is not merely academic. The text is engaging and exciting, and one does not need to read the endnotes to view the complete picture painted. Yet what is truly intriguing about Kauffman’s research methods — and what ultimately led to so many new interpretations and discoveries by the author — was his use of an event-based computer database system into which he input, organized and sorted data by hundreds of different criteria. “It brought to the fore new relationships among the plotters, unnoticed patterns in Booth’s behavior, and a fresh significance to events I once considered unimportant,” Kauffman writes in the introduction. Kauffman also took his research into the field, where he traveled the same roads and waterways as Booth, jumped to the stage of Ford’s Theatre, and even burned down a tobacco barn like the one in which Booth was finally trapped. This pure, impressive dedication to his task, makes Kauffman’s book that much more interesting and credible. American Brutus is superior to anything yet written on the assassination in its scope, content and sheer audacity. Kauffman destroys wrong-headed myths long perpetuated by previous writers, offers new insights and ultimately gives the definitive account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the life of John Wilkes Booth.
Jason Emerson
Journalist Jason Emerson has worked as a National Park Service interpretive ranger at the Lincoln Home in Springfield, Ill., at Gettysburg and in St. Louis. His writings about Lincoln and book reviews have appeared in Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, The Marlboro Review and elsewhere.
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